Fielded Attention: Reframing ADHD Through a Relational Ontology of Context

Abstract

Background:

Since DSM-5, ADHD has been classified as a neurodevelopmental disorder, and this placement has often reinforced dominant models that emphasize neurobiological mechanisms—treating attention as an internal trait shaped by executive dysfunction or dopaminergic imbalance. While these frameworks offer valuable insights, they often marginalize the ecological, relational, and sociomaterial contexts in which attention arises or collapses. Context is too often treated as background rather than condition.

Objective:

This paper proposes a field-based reconceptualization of attention: a relational ontology in which patterns of behavior and experience gathered under the ADHD diagnosis are not solely located within the individual but emerge from dynamic tension between organism and environment.

Methods:

Drawing from ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, and phenomenological psychiatry, we develop the notion of fielded attention—a model in which attention is not a fixed trait but a modulation shaped by rhythm, affordance, and environmental curvature. We conduct a conceptual analysis in three stages: (1) critique of trait-based diagnostic frameworks that statistically neutralize context; (2) elaboration of a field ontology of attention that reframes breakdowns as ruptures in relational coherence; and (3) derivation of translational implications for research and care design.

Results:

The analysis identifies an epistemic shift in which environmental and social structures are often flattened into reductionist risk factors, and heterogeneity in ADHD symptom expression is reframed as field sensitivity—a signal of developmental plasticity rather than diagnostic noise. Translational implications include the design of learning and care environments (including architectural and temporal structure) and adoption of field-sensitive research methods such as ecological momentary assessment and spatial diaries.

Conclusions:

Rather than reject biological models, this framework resituates them within broader ecologies of modulation. By repositioning context as ontologically central, fielded attention advances a more ethically responsive and developmentally situated account of ADHD.